Cashing in on state grant opportunities benefits KJ

Kiryas Joel — This community's latest appeal for cash from one of its most reliable funding sources sounds perfectly reasonable at first.

Chris McKenna

Kiryas Joel — This community's latest appeal for cash from one of its most reliable funding sources sounds perfectly reasonable at first.

What the village asked for — and got — from the Governor's Office for Small Cities was a $400,000 grant to replace 1,720 household water meters, said to be losing accuracy with age.

Its application hit all the right notes: shockingly low income levels; an explosive growth rate; a mandate from the state to conserve water. But did anyone at the state agency stop to wonder how replacing meters would help the village recover 160,000 gallons a day of "lost" water, as it was led to believe?

Every year since 2000, when New York opened the Small Cities office to ladle out community development block grants from the federal government, Kiryas Joel has sought a piece of the action, competing with hundreds of towns, villages, cities and counties around the state.

And every year, Kiryas Joel has come up a winner. All told, it has racked up nearly $3.9 million over seven years, the fifth highest total of 1,282 eligible communities.

There is no evidence that any money was outright misspent — as happened in 1989 and 1990, when Kiryas Joel diverted $100,000 in federal funds for a medical clinic to pay for a school swimming pool and a drainage pipe.

But a closer look at two of the Small Cities-funded projects — the water meters and a chicken slaughterhouse that opened in 2004 — raises questions about whether they have achieved, or could ever achieve, goals the village set in its applications.

It also provides a master class in creative grant-writing by a community famous for its success in that arena.

You would expect to see geysers bursting through the sidewalks.

Over and over, the application states that Kiryas Joel loses 160,000 gallons of water a day — more than 15 percent of its daily production — and implies that the problem can be solved by replacing "antiquated and inaccurate" household water meters.

New meters, the village argued with some nimble wording, would help "identify and account for" the lost water and thereby save Kiryas Joel residents $1.6 million over 10 years.

Interspersed is the usual aria about Kiryas Joel's rapid growth and poverty rate of 63.1 percent — the highest of any municipality in the state, according to Laberge Group, the Albany consultant that wrote the application.

Springing for new meters sounds like a good solution. But not if you read the village's 1999 water conservation plan, which was attached to the grant application.

That document makes clear that most of what Kiryas Joel is referring to as "lost" water is actually water used regularly — and by necessity — to clean its filtration plant. Other so-called "losses" include water used to fight fires and flush mains.

Installing $149 meters with radio transmitters won't recover that water. At best, all it might do is help village officials identify homes with leaky faucets and running toilets.

And how much wasted water could that potentially save? The conservation plan estimated that only 0.6 percent of the village's daily water production was unaccounted for. If that rate holds, only 6,000 gallons a day of truly "lost" water exists to be found.

Asked about the misleading claims, Gedalye Szegedin, the village administrator, said they were less important than "the big picture": that the state ordered Kiryas Joel to conserve water and that replacing old meters will help it do so.

"I want to reduce my losses to the bare, bare minimum," he said.

One thrust in what the village has described as its campaign to boost incomes and wean residents off government aid was the construction of a chicken slaughterhouse.

Officials listed three benefits when asking Small Cities for $750,000 in 2001 to build the plant: It would expand an existing business — the Kiryas Joel Meat Market — while putting people to work and creating an abundant source of kosher meat.

"The impact this project will have on the Village is great due to its magnitude in bringing good-paying and career-based jobs to a community fighting high poverty," the application reads.

Those words were the PIN for Kiryas Joel's Albany ATM.

"Move it on thru!" an enthusiastic state official scrawled on the request.

More than five years later, the plant has undoubtedly yielded cutlets galore and reaped profits for somebody. But how many jobs did it create for Kiryas Joel residents?

The application promised to retain 15 meat market jobs and create 76 more. But it also said starting hourly wages would average $7 or $8 — hardly a "good-paying job" or a living wage for Kiryas Joel families with an average of 8.33 children, as noted elsewhere in the document.

That fact is reflected in the composition of the workforce.

When the plant opened in 2004, village officials admitted that two-thirds of the first 60 employees — those doing the bloody, undesirable work of gutting and cleaning chicken carcasses — came from outside the all-Hasidic community. They were mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants, plus a handful of residents of the Camp La Guardia homeless shelter.

Asked then about the largely imported workforce, Szegedin said the village couldn't control who sought jobs at the plant. He also predicted more Kiryas Joel residents would eventually consent to that type of labor.

Posed the same question this month, Szegedin began by saying that government programs often fail to meet their goals and must be tweaked. Then he changed course and said that many — but not most — of the employees were indeed village residents.

Follow-up papers filed with the Small Cities office and examined by the Sunday Record reported that the plant had 96 workers, 40 of them Hispanic. But it was impossible to verify the accuracy of those numbers or get a firm tally of village residents on the payroll.

Joe Picchi, a spokesman for the office, said this month that the plant has since reported 25 more employees, bringing the total workforce to 121. He didn't know how many were village residents. That was not a concern for his agency.

"The people who are hired are hired by the company, and we can't tell them who to hire," he said.

All grant applications, like resumes and online dating profiles, probably contain an element of blarney. Not fraud, not outright lies — just some stretching and embellishing to look better than you deserve.

Consider two other successful Kiryas Joel pleas for Small Cities money.

In 2002, the village got $400,000 to build what officials labeled, somewhat grandly, an "emergency services command center." This formidable bunker would store the village's entire fleet of emergency vehicles — fire trucks, ambulances and constable cars — under one roof and provide a command and dispatching post.

The center has been up and running for a few years now. But it's a fire station, nothing more. The constable cars are still across town at the sewer plant and the ambulances remain in their garage on Forest Road.

Meanwhile, the second story of the building houses the village's "workforce development center," touted as another component of Kiryas Joel's war on poverty. That village built that floor with a $400,000 Small Cities grant it got in 2000.

In a cover letter to the Small Cities office promoting this job training site, Kiryas Joel Mayor Abe Wieder said that alleviating "high unemployment rates and poverty levels" was the village's "highest priority" and "of great importance."

The exaggeration here was not with the goal but the priority level. The workforce development center, funded in 2000 and completed nearly three years ago, still hasn't opened.

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